External Hard drive can be bad for Ultralite?

[wilkie60]

I have been racking my brain trying to get the little crackle sounds out when using Ultralite. First I am running 1.5 mac powerbook just bought last year with Tiger OSX.4 lastest updates, 1.25 gig ram, DP5 software. external 120 gig FD fantom drive FW- 400 hard drive, and MOTU Ultralite. I have tried every way possible to run these all together I even went and bought a Belkin Powered FW hub so I wasnt losing any power by daisy chaining , to make a long story short I have come down to the external HD everything is fine running staight from my computer so question is, is it the HD or is it something I am not seeing? should I buy another more expensive external hd? Thanks Wilk

[Advuh]

I'm having similar problems with dualcore iMac and Ultralight. It will start these static noises when I start Audiodesk, it doesn't matter what else is connected. I'll post more detailed question about this to the Hardware forum

[WSVP]

I have been racking my brain trying to get the little crackle sounds out when using Ultralite. First I am running 1.5 mac powerbook just bought last year with Tiger OSX.4 lastest updates, 1.25 gig ram, DP5 software. external 120 gig FD fantom drive FW- 400 hard drive, and MOTU Ultralite. I have tried every way possible to run these all together I even went and bought a Belkin Powered FW hub so I wasnt losing any power by daisy chaining , to make a long story short I have come down to the external HD everything is fine running staight from my computer so question is, is it the HD or is it something I am not seeing? should I buy another more expensive external hd? Thanks Wilk

It might be that the Ultralite does not want to share the firewire bus (many firewire devices don't play nicely on the same bus). One option is to add another firewire bus via the PCMCIA expansion slot. Then you can use the PCMCIA based firewire port for your hard drive and keep the Ultralite on the native bus. Remember that most PCMCIA solutions do not provide power, so your Belkin hub may come in handy.

[wilkie60]

Well I came up empty on trying to get the firewire External FD drive to work even with a belin FW powered hub so I dumped everything from that drive in my internal HD and everything cleaned up quite nicely and then went and bought a USB 2.0 320 Gig Maxtor then dumped all recordings on there and what difference it sound great, so I am happy nothing was wrong with the records on the external FD firewire HD it was just that the 2 firewire wouldn't work together so there can be problems. I don.t want to say that none of the FW externals will work with the ultralite there can be issues so if you had the same set up that I had you might get those noises. thanks for all your replies Wilk

[Traveling Eric]

Question..

were you trying to power the external drive thru the bus or with its own power supply?

Traveling Eric

[wilkie60]

The FW drive has it's own power, I was also running both the ultralite and FW drive through a powered hub made by Belin I think it was a compatibilaty issue, it could been the bus, but I think it was more what you call a band width issue between the two, if theres is something different I didn't find it with what I tried. Wilk

[kuene]

i run both my external firewire drive and ultralite off the same buss (same chain) and dont notice any problems. this is on a macbook, and the drive has its own powersource. the order of the units is ultralite --> drive --> macbook. however, i dont normaly record to the drive, so of course, this post may not be of much help. but the drive is on and in use.

[soundchaser]

Static noise is gone after conecting power supply to Ultralite.